I was talking with someone recently about the Webinar Wednesday series, who indicated the owner was giving push-back, and it made me wonder how many companies and owners see training as simply an expense rather than an investment.  What’s ironic, in my opinion, is that our next webinar is geared entirely around thinking like an owner, so that on-site teams understand what drives property value.  One of the big elements they will learn about driving value is working towards rent increases.  So let’s say that a manager who attends the session becomes inspired, and works to push rents up just $5 per unit.  For a 300 unit community, the return on that training investment becomes 60,000%.  In fact, just because of that one windfall, that manager could watch every single webinar for the next 25 years before dropping back down to the break even point.

Another example was our February Craigslist webinar, where Eric Broughton shared two word choices in the Craigslist ad titles that increased views by 12% and 5%.  So simply by taking these two examples and averaging the two, your ads could increase by 8.5% in views.  If that increase equally translates into leads, you suddenly have 8.5% more leads from Craigslist based upon just this one piece of information.  Take your average cost per lead, apply that percentage to your Craigslist results, and you can see what type of ROI you have based upon that one tip.  (Note:  Obviously using the same word choice is going to have diminishing returns over time, but hopefully you still see the point.)

Yet another example comes from a blog where Jason Velasquez shared how you can decrease data entry time from guest cards by 20%.  Again, calculate the number of guests cards your property gets on a monthly basis and you can quickly see the labor ROI from such a simple change.

The point of all this is that investing in training for your employees means you are investing in your property.  Quality training isn’t something that’s done just to make people feel good, although there is an ROI for motivation, but rather it is something that can be implemented that directly affects the bottom line.  So training should be seen as a driver of profitability rather than an expense line item.

Let me ask you all – does your company support training as a way to increase the bottom line?

Update: This post has generated a big conversation on Facebook about whether training is an investment, and if it is, how to measure the ROI of that investment.